Greek, Latin, and the Indian Civil Service

This is a slightly revised version of an article first published in the Cambridge Classical Journal, vol. 51 (2005), pp. 35-71.

Globalizing Mediterranean identities: the overlapping spheres of Egyptian, Greek and Roman worlds at Trimithis

This article furthers recent gains made in applying globalization perspectives to the Roman world by exploring two Romano-Egyptian houses that used Roman material culture in different ways within the city known as Trimithis (modern day Amheida, in Egypt). In so doing, I suggest that concepts drawn from globalization theory will help us to disentangle and interpret how homogeneous Roman Mediterranean goods may appear heterogeneous on the local level. This theoretical vantage is broadly applicable to other regions in the Roman Mediterranean, as well as other environments in which individuals reflected a multifaceted relationship with their local identity and the broader social milieu.

Bilingual 'tagging' of financial accounts in Demotic and Greek

‘Bilingual’ documents, with text in both Demotic and Greek, can be of several sorts, ranging from complete translations of the same information (e.g. Ptolemaic decrees) to those where the information presented in the two languages is complementary (e.g. mummy labels). The texts discussed in this paper consist of a number of examples of financial records where a full account in one language (L1) is annotated with brief pieces of information in a second language (L2). These L2 ‘tags’ are designed to facilitate extraction of summary data at another level of the administration, functioning in a different language, and probably also to make the document accessible to those who are not literate in the L1.